We are the David Wilson Library Research Services Team. Helping researchers with everything from literature searching to open research to publication impact. Blogging items of interest to PGRs, ECRs and researchers.

Subscribe to this blog

Subscribe by email

Search This Blog

Posts

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) recently unveiled a new look and new features. ODNB is one of the best resources for anyone interested in the history and culture of Britain and its former Empire. Here are a few changes worth knowing.

LoginIf you have logged in via the Library you do not need to login for a second time. The 'Sign In' options on the left-hand side are for creating a personal account with the ODNB; it doesn't unlock the content for you. (It could be a good idea to create an account however, as it will allow you to save searches and annotations.)

There are more ways to browse the content. You can now browse biographies by Occupation and Religious Affiliation. For example, browsing by Occupation > Law and crime > Crimes of deception reveals 90 biographies of forgers, fraudsters and swindlers. This includes the intriguing entry for "Carter, Henry [Harry] (1749 1829), smuggler and Methodist preacher".https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:…

You can now export multiple citations from Google Scholar if you have a Google Account. Go to Google Scholar and sign into your Google Account.Conduct your search.Click on the Star icon (Save) under each reference you want to export.Then click on My Library in the top, right of the screen.Select all the references and click on the Export option:

To Export into EndNote

Choose the EndNote option.Open the EndNote file that is created.The references should automatically import into EndNote.
To Export into RefWorksChoose the RefMan option.Save the RIS file that is created.Login to your RefWorks account.Click on the plus (+) button.Choose Import References.Add the RIS file you just saved.Set the file import option to RIS - Reference Manager.Click import and your references will be imported.

--- Good Practice Tip: Always check that all the reference information you need has been imported - e.g. for a journal article = author, title, journal name,. volume, issue, page numbers. If it has not th…

The wrap up of the International Open Access Week 2017 is a perfect occasion to give you an update on Open Access (OA) related activities at University of Leicester accompanied with fun statistics (as fun as statistics can be!). During the Open Access week the University Open Access and Research Data Team ran a series of pop-up stalls at various locations across the main campus as well as in hospital sites (RKCSB & Glenfield), offering advice on raising the discoverability of research profiles. Also as part of the celebrations we have launched a completely redesigned OA website. Visit www.le.ac.uk/openaccess to explore the essential guidance how to make your research outputs OA. The outreach campaign was in addition to routine talks and tailored training sessions that the team provides for departments across the University every year. Throughout the year 2017 we have delivered 16 of such sessions for researchers and 3 workshops in collab…

Just
over a year ago at the University of Leicester Library, we were looking at the
download stats for our online PhD theses and noticed that a study of the village of Wrangle in the early
modern period was the most downloaded item that month. This
got us thinking. Of all the open access theses and research publications in our
online archive what is actually popular with users? Medicine and health related
items do well, presumably from people searching for information on illnesses
and conditions. The other studies that consistently attract downloads are those
about a particular place. Broadly speaking these are from geography,
archaeology and history. Open
access policy has been driven by the sciences and has tended to assume that
freely available publications are an unproblematic ‘good thing’. It has paid less
attention to what is popular, with whom and why. Inspired
by the example of Wrangle, we decided to explore creating a new resource to
promote the open access local history mate…

Make a date with your writing and join us for distraction-free writing sessions in person or online.
Working on a thesis, journal article or book chapter?
Need some distraction-free writing time? Library Research Services are running Shut Up & Write! sessions for researchers in November and December 2017.Tuesday 7th November and Tuesday 5th December - 10am-12noon.Consultation Room, Doctoral College Reading Room, 1st Floor, David Wilson Library

Session outline:
10am: Arrival & Prep
10.15am: Write
11am: Break & Refreshments
11.15am: Write
12noon: End
There is no need to book, just bring your laptop, pad & pen, or preferred writing tools!
You can also use the computers in the Doctoral College Reading Room or borrow a library laptop.
If you can’t join us in person then join us online via Twitter - follow @DWLResearch and use the hastag #suwleic
These two sessions also coincide with the UK Shut Up & Write! sessions on Twitter - follow @SUWTUK and use #suwtuk if you wan…

Benchmarking RDM Training The University of Leicester research data service is involved in an international collaborative project which aims to assess and benchmark the quality of RDM training across institutions.This blog post reports on the progress of the international project so far, it originally appeared on the project blogon 6th October 2017. Remember, you can sign up for one of our generic or discipline-specific 2017/2018 introduction to RDM training sessions here. We look forward to seeing you. How effective is
your RDM training? Collaborators (in alphabetical order by surname): Cadwallader Lauren, Higman
Rosie, Lawler Heather, Neish Peter, Peters Wayne, Schwamm Hardy, Teperek Marta,
Verbakel Ellen, Williamson, Laurian, Busse-Wicher Marta When developing new
training programmes, one often asks oneself a question about the quality of
training. Is it good? How good is it? Trainers often develop feedback
questionnaires and ask participants to evaluate their training. However,
feedba…

As usual the Library is providing a raft of training and workshops during Autumn term, as part of the Researcher Development program: Planning your literature searchConducting your literature searchIntroduction to EndNoteIntroduction to RefWorksAdvanced literature searchingVisualising your dataSearch strategies for systematic reviewsTools for note takingFinding grey literaturePlanning lit search (online)Conducting lit search (online)Research Data ManagementCopyright and your thesisAdvanced EndnoteClick on the link to book your place. Those without links can be booked via PROSE. If you cannot make a training session you are interested in then book a 1to1 appointment (in person or online) by emailing librarians@le.ac.uk We also have online training resources for literature searching, EndNote and RefWorks. New PhD Students: Introduction to the Library, reference management, and research dataAre you new to the University of Leicester library? If you would like to find out more about the Libra…

Just in time for the start of
term, Google Scholar has changed its design and layout. Further details are here.

There is nothing substantially new, but the settings and the advanced search have moved to the ‘drawer
icon’ in the top left.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to search for scholarly literature - particularly journal articles. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions (USA only), from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. It is also good at taking you straight to a pdf copy, where it can. If you are off-campus, we recommend that you change the settings so that Scholar knows you are from the University of Leicester. Go to Settings, then click on Library links. Type "University of Leicester" and click search. Tick all the options that appear and then click Save. This will increase the number of articles you can access.

The new academic year starts next week. We would like to welcome all new PhD students to Leicester, and all returning ones too. We hope you enjoy your time here.

There will be two events introducing the Library and its services for new research students (details below.) We look forward to meeting many of you then, or at other events this term. If you have any questions, please email: librarians@le.ac.uk PhD Students:
Introduction to the Library, reference management, and research dataAre you new to the
University of Leicester library? If you would like to find out more about the
Library and the dedicated support we can provide for researchers, come along to
these 30 minute sessions. When Oct 16, 2017 Introduction to the Library - 10:00 AM to 10:30 AM Introduction to reference management - 10:30 AM to 11:00 AM Introduction to research data - 11:00 AM to 11:30 AM Where Brookfield 0.27 If you would like to attend please book your place via PROSE.

EndNote X8 is being made available on staff and student computers for the 2017/18 academic year.

For staff computers it will be made available to install through the Program Installer. For student computers it will automatically be made available via the Start - All Programs menu.

Remember - the University of Leicester license only allows EndNote X8 to be installed on University owned computers (including University laptops). If you would like to access your references at home then you can sync your EndNote desktop library with EndNote online.

What's new in EndNote X8?
If you're an existing EndNote user then check out the 5min video on what's new:

New to using EndNote?
Then check out the 5min video on EndNote's main features

Relevant data for research can turn up in some unexpected places. For example, we subscribe to a number of financial databases such as SNL, EIKON and Bloomberg. Their main purpose is to provide financial data on companies, stocks and markets. But to aid the industry analysts who use them, the databases also provide wider macroeconomic and demographic data. They even have information on infrastructure and geography.

SNL, to focus on one, is strong on US statistics and contains the populations, age structure, household size and incomes, and unemployment rates of US states.

This information can also be mapped, along with:

World airports, cities, ports, railroads, roads and utilitiesReal estate mortgage information across US
counties Numbers of businesses by NAICS classification. Maps created can be exported, like this one of the population density of Houston:

This is a good lesson in going beyond known databases, and using sources against the grain. The full list of statistics databases we …

During the next year we'll be starting to offer more training and advice on traditional publication metrics and atlmetrics. In the meantime there is already a wealth of altmetric data available to University of Leicester staff and researchers.

Almetrics refers to the the alternative ways your research is being referred to. For example, has it been tweeted, blogged, cited in Wikipedia, picked up by news outlets or mentioned on FaceBook?

There are various companies and platforms that are offering data or ways of collating this data. This post will focus on two: PlumX and Altmetric.

Please be aware: Altmetrics is still a new and emerging field and not all research outputs will have altmetrics data.

Altmetrics in Literature Databases
You will see the PlumX Metrics icon appearing when you search some of our databases e.g. Scopus and EbscoHost.

For example, this Richard III paper by Turi King et al. - you can see the PlumX Metrics option on the right of the page:

At Leicester, we use a version of Open Journal System (OJS) to publish several journals associated with academic departments.

OJS is widely used by libraries who support journal publishing. In the UK, Aberdeen, Kent and UCL all use it. It fair to say that many users have a love/hate relationship with it. Editors and reviewers, in particular, find the 'back end' difficult to use.

The release of Janeway, therefore, sparked our interest. From a readers' point of view, OLH journals have always looked attractive and felt easy to navigate. More than that, the release felt like another step towards a more coordinated open access publishing infrastructure. A clearer division of labour emerging where OLH concentrate on 'flipping' subscription journals to OA, and individual libraries concentrate on supporting exist…

If you are a researcher in the biological sciences, chemistry, digital humanities and sociology the UK Data Service and Jisc would like to invite you to participate in one of several focus groups exploring the use of FAIR data principles within UK academic research.

Two free to attend workshops will be held in September, one in London and the other in Newcastle.What is meant by the FAIR Data Principles?FAIR refers to a set of guiding principles developed by a group of international stakeholders which proposes that scholarly outputs should be:

Findable: easy to find for both humans and computers, with metadata that facilitate searching for specific datasetsAccessible: stored for long term so that they can easily be accessed and/or downloaded with well-defined license and access conditions (open access when possible), whether at the level of metadata, or at the level of the actual dataInteroperable: ready to be combined with other datasets by humans or computersReusable: ready to be used…

The University of Leicester Library has recently extended some of our digital collections, that might be of interest to historians:Grand Tour
Online
Primary sources on travel writing of the "Grand
Tour" of Europe between 1550 and 1850 Jacoby Online
An ancient history database: texts of ancient Greek
historians including Brill’s New Jacoby and Die Fragmente der Griechischen
Historiker or Fragments of the Greek Historians (FGrHist) Parts I-V JustisOne
A law database: full-text historic UK and Irish legislation
from 1235, and links to full-text case law from other legal providers State
Papers Online
State Calendars and Papers from both the Tudor (1509-1603)
and Stuart (1603-1714) periods The Times of
India
Online archive of key colonial newspaper from 1838 to 2007